
Turning the network card off and on again.Typical troubleshooting steps on Macs include three main approaches: 3 Information that we must have in a ticket.1.4 Getting the IP address and MAC address and running "arp -a".1.3 Disable and re-enable the Network Card (NIC).1.1 Release and renew DHCP lease (renew IP address).Questions? Comments? Have a fix? Post them below or e-mail us!īe sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums. While configuration changes from migrating or restoring a system can lead to this problem, at other times major system crashes or power outages can do the same. After the system boots, you may be prompted to allow incoming connections to numerous programs and services, so accept these for now (you can always go to the Firewall settings and deny or remove entries later on) and then try connecting to the network again. To reset the firewall, go to the /Macintosh HD/Library/Preferences/ folder and remove the file called "," and then restart your computer. Luckily the fix is a relatively easy one all you have to do is remove the firewall's preferences and then reboot the system. One that seems particularly vulnerable to odd problems is the system firewall. When people perform major configuration changes to their systems, sometimes the settings may not migrate properly. Usually the main culprit for this is configuration problems with the system's firewall. However, this is only done if the network port detects a proper hardware connection but cannot communicate with the DHCP server to obtain an IP address. The reason OS X issues self-assigned IP addresses is to allow a network interface to create an ad-hoc network if needed, without the presence of an established network. While these are good attempts, many times they do not fix the problem. Initial attempts to address the problem include creating new network locations to refresh the network port configurations, or manually refresh the DHCP lease to force a reconfiguration for the port. Often when I encounter this issue, I find that people have recently made a relatively major configuration change to their systems, either by updating their OS version, performing an upgrade to another major release of OS X, migrating to a new system, or have just restored their systems from backup. When this happens, other systems on the same network (often including similarly configured Macs) will be working just fine, indicating the problem lies with the Mac's configuration and is not a compatibility issue with the networking hardware. One common issue that has affected OS X systems is when network interfaces are issued a self-assigned IP address, even though the system is connected to a network with a properly configured DHCP server.
